A movie directed by a woman was chosen as the greatest movie in the history of cinema by a group of experts.
The film “Jeanne Dillmann, 23 Quay Commerce, 1080 Brussels”, directed by Chantal Ackermann, topped the opinion poll conducted by the “Sight and Sound” magazine of the British Film Institute.
This is the first time that a cinematic work directed by a woman has reached the top ten list. The poll, which is conducted every 10 years, has been criticized for its lack of diversity.
The location of the winning film (as Best Picture) was held for forty years by Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.
He was excluded from this position in 2012 by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (Vertigo).
The 1975 film “Jeanne Dillmann” tells the story of a Belgian widow who turns to prostitution to make ends meet, but then kills one of her clients. The duration of the film is approximately three and a half hours.
Although the film is not as well known outside the realm of film critics as the previous winning films, it was hailed as a “masterpiece” and a pioneering work of feminist cinema.
Belgian film director Chantal Ackermann passed away in 2015 at the age of 65.
Lillian Crawford, a film critic and writer who contributed to the survey, said the film is a “landmark” in feminist cinema.
She told the BBC: “Jane Dillmann is not a movie that makes me say to someone going into the cinema, ‘This is the first movie you should see.'”
“I think if you’re going to go through the list, maybe you should go through it in reverse order to get to it step by step, because it’s a big thing to invite people to watch,” she added.
She concluded, “But in an academic context and when thinking about cinema and encouraging more people to look for experimental films, films directed by women, and in terms of the history of feminist cinema, this is definitely the kind of film that is a landmark.”
Writing for the British Film Institute, Laura Melvey, a professor of film studies at the University of Birkbeck, described the survey as a “shake-up”.
“Things will never be the same again,” she wrote.
This poll has been conducted by the British Film Institute’s “Sight and Sound” magazine every ten years since 1952.
The poll has previously been criticized for the lack of diversity in the experts being polled and in the top 100 films chosen.
In 2012, “Jeanne Dillmann” was among only two films by a feminist director to reach the list, along with one by a black director, Djibril Diop Mambety’s “Tokki Poki”.
Over the years, the number and variety of people consulted has increased. This year, 1,639 critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics were asked to choose their ten favorite films.
The previous winner, “Vertigo,” took second place, while “Citizen Kane” came in third.
The movie “Tokyo Story” by Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu came in fourth place, followed by the movie “Mood of Love” by the Chinese director from Hong Kong, Wong Kar-Wai.
